15 ms·

Really interesting take, I've had the opposite experience. I've also seen very talented c++ devs screw things up in prod that rust doesn't even allow for. Real

Really interesting take, I've had the opposite experience. I've also seen very talented c++ devs screw things up in prod that rust doesn't even allow for. Really recommend taking it more seriously, it's fun once you get a handle on it. Also the tooling is really good now.

shadowgovt 4y ago
C++ has grown several language tools to let you write reliable, safe code. ... But it can't shed the old stuff without breaking backwards compatibility, and that's what bites you. The fact that smart pointers exist now doesn't stop a developer from passing around non -const char* with no size specifier and calling that a "buffer," and because the language is so old and accreted most of its safety features later, the shortest way to express an idea tends to be the likeliest way to be subtly wrong. This is really just a problem that other languages don't have because they didn't have the same starting point.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  It can't shed the old stuff, but it is very, very suspicious -- smelly -- when any of it appears in new code.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    It's smelly if you have enough people on the team to know what new code versus old code smells like. If your developers are coming to the table with some C++ tutorial books written a decade ago, good luck. Invest in a decent linter and opinionated format checker.
- _0w8t 4y ago
  The problem is that there is a lot of code and libraries using older patterns. And modern C++ is sufficiently different from the older C++ to constitute effectively a new language while still being unsafe. Moreover, in an attempt to address the efficiency the language has added views and ranges that provides more ways to corrupt memory. So why rewrite libraries in modern C++ when you can port them to Rust or Go and gain memory safety?

15 ms·

Really interesting take, I've had the opposite experience. I've also seen very talented c++ devs screw things up in prod that rust doesn't even allow for. Real

by crabbygrabby 4y ago

shadowgovt 4y ago
C++ has grown several language tools to let you write reliable, safe code. ... But it can't shed the old stuff without breaking backwards compatibility, and that's what bites you. The fact that smart pointers exist now doesn't stop a developer from passing around non -const char* with no size specifier and calling that a "buffer," and because the language is so old and accreted most of its safety features later, the shortest way to express an idea tends to be the likeliest way to be subtly wrong. This is really just a problem that other languages don't have because they didn't have the same starting point.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  It can't shed the old stuff, but it is very, very suspicious -- smelly -- when any of it appears in new code.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    It's smelly if you have enough people on the team to know what new code versus old code smells like. If your developers are coming to the table with some C++ tutorial books written a decade ago, good luck. Invest in a decent linter and opinionated format checker.
- _0w8t 4y ago
  The problem is that there is a lot of code and libraries using older patterns. And modern C++ is sufficiently different from the older C++ to constitute effectively a new language while still being unsafe. Moreover, in an attempt to address the efficiency the language has added views and ranges that provides more ways to corrupt memory. So why rewrite libraries in modern C++ when you can port them to Rust or Go and gain memory safety?